Court halts Texas execution following bungled Oklahoma incident

A federal appeals court stayed the execution of a Texas prisoner who, according to his lawyers, is intellectually disabled. The defense also cited issues in a recent Oklahoma execution which used an undisclosed drug combination, just as Texas does.

With just hours to spare before Robert James Campbell was
scheduled to die by lethal injection, the US Court of Appeals for
the Fifth Circuit gave Campbell’s defense team more time to prove
that he was intellectually disabled to the point where he is not
eligible to be executed.

“It is regrettable that we are now reviewing evidence of
intellectual disability at the eleventh hour before Campbell’s
scheduled execution,” the justices wrote. “However, from
the record before us, it appears that we cannot fault Campbell or
his attorneys, present or past, for the delay.”

A neuropsychologist who examined Campbell previously diagnosed
the convicted rapist and murderer with a “mild mental
retardation,” which defense attorneys say falls under the US
Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling which decided “the mentally retarded
should be categorically excluded from execution.”

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a petition wondering why
Campbell waited so long to claim he is handicapped.

“Campbell’s last-minute claim of mental retardation, which
was previously raised and rejected in the federal and state court
does not warrant review. Campbell is not mentally retarded,”
Abbott said, as quoted by CNN.

The mental capacity appeal was one of two pleas for mercy that
the defense filed in an attempt to save Campbell’s life. The
second appeal cited an attempt at lethal injection in Oklahoma
that went horribly wrong. Oklahoma and Texas authorities have
both refused to publicly disclose which drugs are used to execute
inmates.

In the case of Clayton Lockett, Oklahoma used for the first time
a three-drug cocktail without addressing concerns from Lockett’s
representation or medical professionals. Once the drug was
administered, Lockett remained awake for longer than usual and,
after briefly losing consciousness, appeared to wake up only to
convulse and moan in agony. He eventually died of a heart attack.

The episode inspired a national conversation about how capital
punishment is carried out in the US. Opponents of the death
penalty cited the case as proof that the process is flawed, while
advocates maintained that a single case going wrong is not
evidence of a problem. White House spokesman Jay Carney told
reporters the next day that the Lockett execution clearly “fell
short” of human standards.

Texas has executed 515 people since 1976, by far more than any
state (Oklahoma coincidentally takes second place, with a tally
of 111 people). Even after the Lockett accident, Texas officials
said they were ready to carry out the process without concern
that Campbell would go through the same fate.

European drug makers have, on principle, stopped manufacturing
chemicals known to be used in the death penalty to states that
still use capital punishment. When those states turned to local
pharmacies, those businesses were boycotted, so officials now say
the identity of each drug used in the cocktail must remain
secret.

"Their fear is that the companies will refuse to give them
the drugs or sell them the drugs once they're names are made
public," Richard Dieter, of the Death Penalty Information
Center, told RT in an interview. "Texas is trying to find
them from a secret source, a compounding pharmacy, probably
within Texas. But they don't want to reveal it lest they lose
that contact."

Maurie Levin, a death penalty lawyer who also represents
Campbell, told The New York Times that despite the frequency
of executions, “Texas doesn’t have some kind of magic
touch.”

“There’s nothing that says we can’t trust Oklahoma, but we
can trust Texas,” she said, adding that the potential of a
mistake being made is “exponentially greater when executions
are carried out in secret.”